240-yard border tunnel near Yuma tied to meth smuggling

For more than six months, agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration kept an eye on an industrial area on the outskirts of San Luis, a border town in the southwestern corner of Arizona near Yuma.

The agents suspected it was being used to stash drugs smuggled across the border from Mexico. But, on Saturday, they discovered one of the buildings they were watching contained a major drug tunnel that stretched 240 yards, the length of two football fields, to an ice plant on the Mexican side of the border.

Engineered with 4-by-6 beams, plywood walls, ceilings and floors, and a lighting and ventilation system, the fully operational tunnel was used to smuggle methamphetamine and possibly other drugs, the DEA said.

"From what I've heard and in my experience, this is probably the most sophisticated tunnel that they've probably found in Arizona," said Doug Coleman, special agent in charge of the DEA's Phoenix field office.

Coleman estimated the tunnel cost $1.5 million and took more than a year to build.

Federal law-enforcement officials say the tunnel shows how drug-smuggling organizations continue to rely on underground passageways to evade increased security at ports of entry and in the desert.

"The fact that smuggling organizations are using tunnels is a sign that they are having less success in other, more traditional smuggling methods either at or between the ports of entry," said Matthew Allen, special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations in Arizona.

Most of the recent cross-border tunnels in Arizona have been found in the Nogales area and are crudely dug, Coleman said. The tunnel discovered Saturday was more than 4 feet wide and traveled more than 55 feet below the ground.

'Piece of work'

"It's really a piece of work," he said. "It looks like it was designed to be on a pulley system where you could just download the drugs in San Luis (Rio Colorado, Sonora) and use a pull cart to pull them all the way through and then pop them up on this side."

Coleman said he does not believe the tunnel was in operation for more than a week, based on the "pristine" condition of the shaft and the fact that drums filled with dirt removed from the tunnel were on pallets still inside the building. "I think it was very new," he said.

Drug tunnels are expensive and time-consuming to build, Allen noted. They force smugglers to use a fixed location to smuggle drugs into the U.S. rather than drive them concealed in vehicle compartments through ports of entry or carry them in backpacks through the desert.

"That investment of time, effort and resource is a sign of how the smuggling organizations are having to innovate to overcome the law-enforcement resources that are on the border these days," he said.

The tunnel discovered near Yuma is also unusual because most drug tunnels in Arizona have been built in the Tucson and Douglas areas.

Since 1990, 99 drug tunnels have been found in Arizona, but only four were in the Yuma area, Allen said.

He said the tunnels found in the Yuma area tend to be more sophisticated because of the sandy soil there.

Allen did recall a tunnel discovered in 1990 in the Douglas area that he described as more elaborate than the one found in San Luis. He said it was constructed with concrete.

Since the start of the fiscal year in October, federal authorities have discovered six tunnels in Arizona, including the one in San Luis, he said. Last year, 14 tunnels were found in Arizona, up from seven the year before.

On Thursday, DEA officials released new information about how the tunnel in San Luis was discovered.

On July 6, a Department of Public Safety officer pulled over a black Ford F-150 on Arizona 95 in the Yuma area. DPS officers discovered 39 pounds of methamphetamine wrapped in packages in the bed of the truck.

DPS officers contacted DEA agents and, after comparing notes, obtained a warrant to search a white cinderblock business on Archibald Street west of the San Luis Port of Entry, officials said.

DEA officials arrested the driver and a passenger in the truck. They also arrested a third man found inside the building, Coleman said.

He said law-enforcement officials are investigating who owns the building, which could lead to more arrests.

Spencer Tippets, a spokesman for the Yuma Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, said the tunnel shows how desperate drug smugglers have become in the Yuma area, where drug seizures and arrests of illegal immigrants are down sharply.

"Because we are doing such a good job at securing the border, the drug-trafficking organizations are resorting to drastic measures like tunnels to smuggle their contraband into the country," he said.

Coleman, at the DEA, said that the Sinaloa cartel controls most of the drug smuggling into Arizona.

Battling tunnels

In June, President Barack Obama signed a bill aimed at combating a rise in the number of drug-smuggling tunnels under the U.S.-Mexican border.

The law makes it a crime to conspire to build tunnels, supplementing a law that punishes those who construct them. The maximum penalty is 20 years in prison.